ON THE OUTDOORS.

On The Kankakee, Smallie Fishing Can Be Hot When It's Cold

December 10, 1995|By John Husar.

Most sane fishermen would presume it's a little cold outside right now to think of smallmouth bass. And I would second that. There comes a point of chill when even voracious smallies back into rocky crevasses and hunker down for the winter.

You might catch one by laying a grub or minnow beneath its nose, but that would be only luck.

Yet there I was with Matt Mullady a little more than a week ago, in a bitterly cold rain on the Kankakee River, searching for smallies as winter raised its hammer to crush what was left of the skull of fall.

Having guided for smallies for 18 years on the Kankakee, Mullady has found ways to stretch the limits. He actually thinks he can catch those fish as late as the second week of December. And he has, when it was a teeny bit warmer. As long as his boat floats instead of skids, he is willing to give it a try.

As we launched into a broad pool full of tantalizing pockets near Davis Creek a few miles below the city of Kankakee, Matt was even optimistic. Just a few days earlier, he had boated a 17-inch smallie and a 7 1/2-pound walleye in 36-degree weather. You just need a little steady sunlight to spark some biotic life to stimulate the fishery, he maintains.

Turtles are a good sign.

"When it gets a little warm like that, the turtles pop out of their holes and climb onto dead limbs to sun themselves," Matt said. "When you see that--no matter how late in the year--the fishing is going to be good."

In our case, there had been a few days of warm, sunny weather, but no turtles, and now Matt was worried. He sensed the warm spell had stimulated a mini-feeding frenzy, which we might have missed. There was a good chance those fish already were gorged with food. Perhaps the front would make them feed a little more.

"This front will be either our best friend or worst enemy--we'll find out which," Mullady predicted.

There is much to be said about late fall fishing on a stream such as the Kankakee. No one else is on the water. You are uniquely alone with nature, drifting the current, skirting riffles, anchoring beside prolific eddies, occasionally exploring a deerpath on shore.

We slipped through 5 miles of woodland river scenery, part of it state park. Our only encounter was with a pair of duck hunters who had gone to their car. They had quit too early, considering we pushed a few mallards toward their empty blind.

We were probing what we hoped were wintering places for these fish, pools of stable water that stay at least 3 to 6 feet deep. Crawdads and helgramites emerge there on sunny days, supplying the fish with food. They will hold as many as 25 smallmouth, plus an assortment of other species. Mullady says he knows of 20 to 25 such wintering pools, but there should be many more.

We started with small minnows and twister tails on narrow keeper jigs that ride through the bottom rocks with very few hangups. After several drifts in slick water hideaways below deadfalls and riffles, we slowly got the notion that maybe we were using the wrong bait.

Mullady wisely had caught some chunky 4- to 5-inch-long creek chubs on ice spoons to use for bait, and these began generating action. The few fish that were willing to hit clearly wanted something big, but their strikes were weak and tentative.

Mullady once watched his chub-tipped line "swim away" for nearly 30 seconds before he dared set the hook. And even then, the fish hadn't swallowed the bait, judging by marks on the chub's scales.

We both had hits like that, fish grabbing the chub in the middle and merely hauling it around. Human restraint can last only so long. You count, you fume, you wait until the smallmouth "absolutely, positively" has had to swallow the bait. And still there is nothing there but a dented chub when you jerk the line. This cold front was proving to be anything but our friend.

Soon enough, it turned into a mini-gale, with a touch of sleet and nearly horizontal rain. The fishing went down the tubes, but a couple of miles of drifting remained with our car stashed downstream.

And this might have been the most interesting part of it all. We fished as we drifted, probing likely spots. And garbed from the weather with decent rain gear, we actually suffered little. Matt produced home-grilled turkey sandwiches and I had some canned lemonade, so we dined like kings in our swirling world of sleety rain. The blues and grays of the sky and river combined with the rich, woody browns and grays and oranges of barren forests to show us a palette that rarely is seen.

The animals and fish were there; we even saw a couple jump. There were deer, hawks, ducks, owls and errant egrets.

Mullady has good reason to believe in late smallmouth fishing. In September alone, he estimates he caught at least 200 on topwater baits, mainly on Zara Puppies and Devil's Horses. He boated his biggest fish of the year, a 4.6-pounder, in late October. It was his fifth smallie in the 4-pound class this year.

"I'll stay on this water as long as I can. I'll fish it 300 days," he murmured as our landing came into sight. Of course, we paused once more in the rain, got another bite, and made one smallmouth roll.

That would be achievement enough on a day that might have seemed bone-chilling and gloomy, but which truly left us exultant and fulfilled.

Everyone should float a great river in the winter. The fishing is secondary.